


All that is left is light

by irisdouglasiana



Category: Luke Cage (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, and so am I tbh, mr. gangster consultant is a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 07:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15384057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: Shades does what gangsters do: he adapts.





	All that is left is light

**Author's Note:**

> CW: descriptions of domestic violence.

Shades goes back to prison, and he does what gangsters do; the only thing he knows how to do—he adapts. He hasn’t forgotten the rules that delineate inside from outside. So he keeps his head on a swivel and tries to avoid dwelling on what he’s lost. All he needs to do is survive.

* * *

_“Herrrrrrrnan,” Mariah says, rolling the_ r _and drawing it out as far as it will go. She slips onto his lap, pinches his chin between her thumb and forefinger, and gives him a long, searching look. Then she tilts her head back and laughs. He’s never seen anything quite so beautiful as Mariah Dillard bathed in the soft blue glow of the lights of Harlem’s Paradise, their half-finished drinks long forgotten on the table, the bass pulsing in the background. He breathes in her scent; the mixture of her perfume and lotion and alcohol and sweat, and in that moment he knows he loves her. The words slip out of him without thinking, and Mariah goes still._

_“Don’t say it unless you mean it, baby.” Her voice is brittle. She leans in and speaks quietly in his ear. “You're either all in with me, or you're not. If you use me, lie to me, betray me—I will fuck you up. I will destroy you. You can count on that.” Mariah sits back, drawing one finger slowly down his chest while she grinds against his crotch. She arches an eyebrow. “We good?”_

_“We good,” he says, just barely holding back a groan. Later, after the club closes and the staff goes home, he’ll have her right here in this chair, downstairs on the couches in VIP, on her desk in the office, on any surface that will hold them. Whatever she wants, anywhere she wants. “And I meant it.”_

* * *

He has very few visitors. Mostly just his new lawyer, who prints out the entire dossier Mariah compiled on him, a stack of paper three inches thick. He can’t help but smile when he sees it, admiring her thoroughness. It doesn’t surprise him that it exists, of course—he’d had too much on her for her _not_ to, however much she loved him. All of it is incredibly damning; all of it done with an eye towards the type of evidence a jury would find convincing. It’s a highly professional piece of work. There are footnotes and an index and all that shit. Bank transactions. Phone metadata. An entire appendix dedicated to his list of aliases.

“She really thought of everything,” he tells his lawyer, who doesn’t quite see the humor in the situation. If Mariah had lived, she would have pinned it all on him and found a way to wiggle out of the worst of her charges. He wouldn’t even have been angry about it. He can picture her standing before the judge, tears rolling down her cheeks, voice quivering: _I trusted Hernan—I mean, Mr. Alvarez—I trusted him completely, your Honor_ , she would have said. _He said we would run Harlem together, and he called me his queen._ Maybe she’d catch a year or two for SEC or IRS violations, get out early for good behavior, and then work overtime to rehabilitate her image. Paint herself as a reformed woman and take back Harlem’s Paradise and more. But that won’t happen now.

Tilda visits him once. Sitting back behind the glass with her arms crossed, watching him with utter contempt. Mariah’s daughter, indeed. It doesn’t take him long to realize that she’s after her mother’s assets. “I can help you,” she says. She’ll pay for a better lawyer; maybe get his sentence reduced. Or help in other ways. He plays along for a bit, just to fuck with her, and then he laughs in her face. Even if he knew all the different places where Mariah had hidden away her money, he wouldn’t tell her. She didn’t get shit from Mariah and she won’t get shit from him.

“Dumb bitch,” he jeers. “You think you’re better than she was? You’re not even half as smart. Now get the fuck out.”

Tilda slams down the phone and storms off. Shades laughs until he can hardly breathe.

* * *

_Summer of ’93, and Harlem belongs to Shades and Che: they pull off their first armed robbery at a Korean grocery on the corner of Malcolm X and 133 rd; they break into half a dozen apartments and carry out jewelry, cash, and guns; they scrawl their names in red and black spray paint under bridges and in alleys. They use their earnings to buy Jordans and cover Che’s mama’s rent. (Janis, working three jobs to pay for Che’s little brother’s chemo and her late husband’s debts, doesn’t ask where the money came from.) They jump the turnstiles and take the subway to other neighborhoods, deep into enemy territory. They act like fools and mostly get their asses handed to them, and then they go back for more. On the hottest nights of the year, they lie on the roof of Che’s apartment and look up at the stars, even though the city lights almost drown them out. They talk about everything up there, or almost everything. Shades sometimes thinks he sees something in Che’s eyes that can’t quite be spoken, and it makes him a little uneasy because it all feels _right _._

_Once, half-drunk on a bottle of stolen tequila, Che suddenly rolls over on his side and kisses Shades. “Why’d you do that?” Shades asks, more bemused than angry, and after a moment Che bursts out laughing and Shades laughs along like it’s all a big joke. Then Che lies back down and stares up at the night sky, the moon just one more point of light among the streetlamps and neon signs. “I don’t know, B,” he says softly._

_They don’t talk after that. They just watch the stars. And at least for that summer, Harlem is theirs._

_Rivals? Ain’t got none…_

* * *

Che’s mother comes to see him. It’s three months after his conviction; over a year since he killed her son. The last time he had seen her was at the trial, and before that, when she spat in his face after he confessed to the murder. He can barely bring himself to look Janis in the eye, even with the thick glass separating them. Her hand trembles as she picks up the phone, and he braces himself.

She exhales slowly. “Hernan, I forgive you,” she says, and he can’t help it. He just starts bawling.

* * *

_There’s so much blood. Shades has never been squeamish; he’s seen what knives and bullets can do to bodies. But it’s different when he’s the one holding the gun and firing. The Jamaican cat had pulled his gun on them first, he’s sure of it, or pretty sure of it, and the next thing he knew, the kid was bleeding out on the ground. Two shots to the chest. It happened so fast. He’s never killed anyone before. There’s a roaring in Shades’ ears and all he can do is stare at the Yardie as the blood soaks into the pavement. In this light, it looks almost black._

_"We gotta go, man,” Comanche is saying. His voice sounds far away. Che grabs him by the elbow, and after a moment, Shades follows. Later, Shades doesn’t even remember how they disposed of the gun or his bloody clothing. He does remember vomiting in the backyard of Mama Mabel’s brownstone sometime after midnight, and her standing in the doorway ordering him to clean that shit up, and Cornell coming out to ream them for fucking with the Yardies, even though they were already technically at war. He tells Comanche to shut his goddamn mouth and stop making excuses for his little_ boyfriend _with his stupid-ass cheap-ass sunglasses. “There’s actual rules to this shit,” Cornell snarls. “Freelance again, and I’ll hand your asses over to the Jamaicans myself.”_

_They sneak into Che’s mama’s place so Shades can shower. He turns the water as hot as it will go and practically scalds himself, then gets dressed in Comanche’s clothes. Afterwards, he takes a seat at the kitchen table across from Che, puts his head down, and closes his eyes. The image of the dead Yardie is burned into his brain. God, there had been so much blood. “I killed him, Che,” he mumbles._

_“Listen, B. You had to do it, okay?” Comanche says quietly, but with force. “You did what you had to do.”  
_

* * *

He’s just about worked through the idea that he’s going to be in Seagate until he dies when he gets the call from his lawyer. His conviction is getting overturned, the lawyer tells him. The judge got caught taking a bribe in his case. The AG is asking for a retrial. When Shades hangs up, he swallows hard and tries to tamp down on his excitement. He knows how much evidence there is against him; they have his own fucking confession on tape, all thirteen hours, forty-seven minutes, twelve seconds of it. He’s listened to himself on audio over and over, hearing the glee in his voice. Laughing and shit. He’d been sure to leave out no details. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The only time he had stumbled over his words was when Knight had started asking about Comanche.

The AG offers a shitty plea deal that his shitty lawyer begs him to take. Life in prison, possibility of parole after forty years. He’d be eighty-five before he’d be eligible, but he knows there’s no way in hell a parole board would even consider him. He turns down the deal. They go back to trial, and it’s a real shitshow. The prosecutors are so overconfident that they repeatedly fuck themselves over, and his defense is just competent enough to take advantage and convince the judge to throw out his confession. A mistrial is declared. Then another retrial that ends in a mistrial. In the end, all they’re able to get him on is tax evasion, identity theft, and insider trading, and he’s sentenced to time already served. As they uncuff him, he looks over his shoulder and flashes a grin at Knight, seated a few rows behind him. The corners of her lips are turned up in a smile but her posture is rigid.

She catches him on his way out of the courthouse. “Just try it. Try one goddamn thing, and I’ll have your ass back in prison before you can blink,” she warns. “I’m not done with you, _Hernan_.”

There’s nothing she can do to him, and they both know it. “Oh, we’re done all right, _Misty_ ,” he chuckles, and leaves her standing there, fuming.

* * *

_Mariah’s bed is the most comfortable he’s ever slept in: thousand count thread sheets, down pillows, a mattress that cost more money than the house he grew up in back in Ponce. Whenever he stays the night, he always gets up at dawn and slips out of her brownstone before she wakes. It’s mostly out of habit; prison taught him to sleep with one eye open, ready to bolt awake at the faintest sound, muscles tensed up and hands balled into fists. Even now, more than a year after Seagate, he can’t shake it. But this morning, for whatever reason, he lingers, just lying there and listening to her breathe. Eventually, he sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. He’s reaching down to pick up his shirt when he hears Mariah stir behind him._

_“Where you going?” Mariah’s eyes are still closed, but there’s a faint smile on her lips._

_“Out,” he says, but it’s too late. He’s been caught sneaking away like a college kid after a one night stand._

_She rolls over and grabs his wrist. She has no makeup on and her voice is still thick with sleep, but her grip on him is firm. “Why? You embarrassed or what?”_

_“Of course not,” he says scornfully. He drops his shirt on the floor where he had left it the night before and slides back under the covers, pulling her body close to him. She draws her fingernails along his spine and bites his lip, but not hard. He squeezes her ass and nips at her in return, planting kisses along her neck and down her collarbone._

_"You don’t have to leave,” she murmurs. “Hernan, I want you to stay.” So he stays._

* * *

The first thing he does when he’s out is pay for Mariah’s headstone. Tilda hadn’t held a funeral for her mother, just had her cremated—destroying the evidence of her murder, he figures; he doesn’t know exactly how she pulled it off but it’s not hard to guess—and disposed of the ashes who knows where. Like a lot of people, Tilda wants Harlem to forget Mariah; she wants to believe that it is possible for Harlem to be reborn. As if that wasn’t the exact same language Mariah used when she urged them to let the past be the past and to embrace a glorious future. But Shades picks out a plot for her in a quiet corner of the Trinity Church Cemetery, not far from where she would have held court as director of her Family First initiative. The headstone he chooses is small but tasteful, with only her name and dates of birth and death. There should be something in this city that bears her name, he thinks. He brings creamy white gardenias, her favorite flowers, and spends a long time standing by her grave.

“I still love you,” he says, and walks away.

* * *

_“I wasn’t there for him, B.” Even though Seagate is always uncomfortably warm, Che is shivering. The words keep spilling out of him faster and faster, in between big gulping breaths. “I knew the cancer was back, but, you know, he’d beat it before, right? When he was a kid. You remember. I thought he’d be okay. Darnell was fucking tough, man. I didn’t know it could spread so fast. I didn’t—I couldn’t—” His voice is barely more than a whisper. “He died and I wasn’t there.”_

_“Darnell would’ve wanted you to be strong. He understood,” Shades says, even though it’s a bad lie. They both know his brother would have been fucking pissed._

_Che doesn’t even seem to hear him. “I wasn’t there,” he repeats hollowly, staring off into space. He’s miles away._

_Shades knows he should tell him to compartmentalize that shit. Keep his head in the game; don’t even think about it until he’s out of Seagate. Do what he has to do to survive. That’s what has always gotten him through, in the past. But he doesn’t say any of those things. Instead, he wraps his arms around Comanche and just holds him. “I got you, Che. Okay? I got you.”_

* * *

He knows where Comanche’s grave is, but he doesn’t visit. He can’t. Not yet. It still hurts too much.

* * *

Shades is done, he really is, but there’s still a couple loose ends to tie up. The first is easy. He goes to Mother’s Touch to see Tilda. He takes his time wandering around the store and talking casually about how she’s remodeled the place. Doesn’t lay a finger on her or even get within ten feet of her, just drops a few hints about what he knows while she sweats nervously and clutches her gun under the counter. He’s not going to kill Tilda, of course, even after what she did to Mariah. Death is quick. Better for her to live with the knowledge that he’s out there so she can spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder.

The other loose end has been hanging over him for much longer. Nearly all of his NYPD contacts are out, but Detective Benitez still owes him a few favors, so he calls them in. All missing persons reports filed in Harlem in the fall of 1985, and every Jane Doe recovered anywhere in the city from that period onward. “Seriously, man?” Benitez complains over the phone. “ _All_ of them?”

“All of them,” Shades confirms.

Benitez grumbles, but after a week or so he comes back with a flash drive and a binder of photocopied records. With nothing else to do, Shades spends hour after hour going through them. He could have asked Benitez to run a name on the missing persons reports or give him information to cull through the Jane Does, of course, but he has to see for himself. It’s been more than three fucking decades. He needs to know.

The missing persons reports are the easy part. There are only so many, and he can quickly flip through and eliminate them one by one. Men, women, children of every ethnicity, ranging in age from three months to eighty-nine years old. Some resolved, some still missing. He knows he probably won’t find her among them, and he doesn’t.

He moves on to the Jane Does, working in chronological order from oldest to most recent, and his task becomes much harder. He reads report after report and looks at pictures of bodies in varying stages of decay, and rules them out one by one. For the most part, he’s able to stay objective as he sifts through the photographs, but then he comes across one of an older woman who resembles Mariah, with her neck bent at an awkward angle and the back of her head bashed in. His stomach turns and he quickly shoves that report to the bottom of the pile. He sits there for a moment, staring at the wall, before turning back to the records.

It’s been so long that he doesn’t have much to go off of. He knows she would have been in her mid-thirties in 1985. About five and a half feet tall, perhaps 130 pounds. Shoulder-length dark hair and brown eyes. He doesn’t even have a picture of her. One sunny day in September, he’d come home after cutting school and kicking it on the street corner, made himself dinner like he always did, turned on the television, and watched the sky darken outside. He fell asleep on the couch and when he woke up in the morning, she still wasn’t home. He made breakfast, watched more TV, made faces in the mirror, went through all his mother’s things and stole some cash. He waited and waited and she never came back.

He almost misses the copy of the report taken down by Officer Eddie Ruiz, June 3, 1987. Badly decomposed partial human remains, discovered by a couple of teenagers hanging out under the 145th Street Bridge. The autopsy determined the cause of death to be multiple stab wounds. Other than that, there’s little to go off of. No ID or distinguishing marks on the body, no matching dental records, race unknown. He nearly sets that report aside when a bit of blue in one of the photographs catches his eye. It’s a piece of a shoe, a woman’s dirty tennis shoe with bright blue laces, and he puts the report down and shuts his eyes. It isn’t much, but he just _knows_. There she is, no mistake.

Nydia Teofila Alvarez Estrada. He’s finally found her, and he knows where he has to go. What he has to do.     

* * *

Shades gets out of New York. It’s not like he could stay, even if he wanted to. He cashes in whatever is left of his assets and catches a plane to San Juan. He hasn’t seen the island since he was six, when his mom took him and left. He still remembers the drive out of Ponce in the dead of night, how Nydia kept looking over her shoulder even as they boarded the plane, telling him to shut up and stop asking questions. Now he makes that journey in reverse. He steals a car out of the airport parking lot and heads south, driving in the pouring rain from Caguas to Cayey, El Ojo to Juana Diaz and finally to the outskirts of Ponce. This is home, but he doesn’t recognize it, and nobody recognizes him. He gets lost driving around the city, circling around vaguely familiar neighborhoods. When the rain stops, he goes to the beach and stands there for a long time, watching the storm clouds blow away.  

It’s late in the evening before he finds the house. It’s smaller than he remembers, and more run down. The exterior walls are still painted turquoise, but the paint is cracked and chipped. Part of the roof has caved in and all the windows are boarded up. A rusting Pontiac with four flat tires rests in the yard, hidden in the weeds. The forest has grown in around the vacant residence next door: trees pushing up through tile floors, coquis chirping in the water that has pooled in the pothole-filled driveway. He straightens his tie, glances at his reflection in the rearview mirror, and pushes back a wave of revulsion. _Ghetto trash._ Mariah hadn’t been wrong about him.  

The door isn’t even locked. Roaches scatter as he walks through the kitchen, stepping over piles of garbage. Shades finds the old man in the living room. He sits hunched over in a ratty brown armchair in front of the television, an oxygen tank at his side. His hair is white and wispy, and he smells awful, like a dying person.   

“Hernan,” his father says, looking up at him. He doesn’t seem surprised.

“Did you do it?” This is the question he’s been waiting years to ask, and it comes out shaky, like he’s six years old again. Cowering in the corner of the kitchen; squeezed under the bed with beads of sweat and tears running down his chin; his back up against the wall of the closet behind his mother’s dresses, paralyzed with fear at the sound of his father’s voice. Andres never shouted when he was angry. He’d speak softly to Nydia while he wrapped his hands around her throat and squeezed.

His father contorts his face and makes a wheezing sound, and it takes Shades a moment to realize the old man is laughing. “Of course I did it,” his father says harshly. “Of course I killed her.” He nods at the gun in Shades’ hand. “That’s what you came back for? Go on, then, boy. Do it.” He curls his lips into a smile, and Shades knows that expression. He sees it in the mirror every single day.

In the end, Shades walks away. You can’t kill the devil. You can only feed him.

* * *

In his dream, Harlem’s Paradise is bathed in red. Slivers of glass crunch underneath his feet as he follows the splattering of blood to the foot of the stage. Mariah is clutching the mic stand, but this time, there is no body on the floor. The blood is her own. She looks up when he approaches, eyes wide with shock and fear, and he nearly has to pry the mic stand out of her hands. Her breathing is ragged and short. He brushes the hair out of her face and carefully wipes the blood dribbling out from the corner of her mouth. She stares at him for a moment, and then slaps him. Hard.

“I’m still pissed at you,” she snaps, and raises her hand to slap him again.

He catches her wrist. “I expected that.”

Mariah pulls away and walks over to the bar to pour herself a drink. After a moment, she pours one for him too. “It’s not poisoned,” she says dryly as she hands it to him.

“Doesn’t matter. None of this is real.” He takes a sip.

She shakes her head. “I thought you were smarter than that. Reality is what you make it. It’s all spin.” She drains her drink, sets the glass down, and stabs a finger at his chest. “Are you sorry?”   

Maybe this is real, maybe it isn’t. He takes her hands in his, anyway. This time, she doesn’t pull back. She’s so warm. “I did what I had to do. You know that, right?”

She laughs. “Keep telling yourself that, baby.”

* * *

In another dream, Shades and Comanche are lying on the roof of Che’s apartment again, watching the stars. Except they’re not kids anymore; they’re grown, and Che is bleeding from the bullet holes in his chest. Comanche touches the wounds gingerly and his fingers come away covered in blood, but he doesn’t seem perturbed. “You really loved her,” he says. It’s a simple statement of fact; there is no jealousy or doubt in his voice.

“I did,” Shades agrees. He tears his gaze away from Comanche and focuses on the stars overhead. When they were kids, they’d barely seen any stars at all because of the glare of the streetlights. But in this version of Harlem that exists only in his dreams, the night sky is velvet-black and filled with more stars than he can count. He can see the band of the Milky Way stretching across the horizon; a cloud of magnificent purples and deep blues, but only one galaxy out of billions. It had been Che who told him that most of the stars in the sky are already gone, and all that is left is their light, racing to earth, cutting through space and time. Entire civilizations rise and fall in the time it takes for a star to die and for its light to fade. Human lives are only a blip in the afterlife of a star.

“I loved you too,” Che murmurs.

Shades closes his eyes. “I know.”

* * *

Shades does what gangsters do: he adapts. He stays in Ponce and starts over. It doesn’t take him long to get the lay of the land, learn who the players are, and build his way back up. Sometimes he thinks about New York; wonders what’s up with Harlem’s Paradise and Luke Cage and all the rest. He knows he’s not going back, though—with Che and Mariah both gone, nothing is left for him there except memories.

Still, he doesn’t regret it. No time is ever really wasted.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know about the rest of you, but season 2 fucked me up and I needed closure.


End file.
